The reason (among others) why people are still being ’smuggled‘ through Bulgaria is the official closing of the, so called, humanitarian corridor (also known as „balkan-route“) in March 2016, which was forced by the governments of several European countries. Without a legal corridor and being denied safe traveling such provoked ‚accidents‘ will happen again and again.

Photo credit: Bulgarian National Television (BNT)

Update: The UNHCR came out with a report in August which added together the numbers of interceptions at the Turkish-Greek and the Turkish-Bulgarian land borders from January-August 2017 and mentioned a quantity of 17,067 people. Only in August a number of 464 was intercepted at the Bulgarian-Turkish border by Turkish land forces.